Software to manage AD&D characters

Question

Is there some software out there (beside core rules) that does character management? Really what I am looking for is a way to fill out the sheet and remember the information so I can update it and print it out (and make a PDF copy) for the next session. Does this make any sense? Core rules has never really worked for me once you factor in the house rules and modifications.

Answer 1

Honestly, for AD&D 1E and 2E (And 3.x!) I never found any better method than creating your own character sheet in Excel (preferred) or Word (if you don't know Excel). The easiest way to do it is to take one of the existing PDF character sheets you can find out there and roughly copy the layout in Word. It gives you the chance to add extra rows where you know you always need them, and remove then where you don't. I've never found a character sheet where I didn't say "Why are there only two weapon slots and like seven armor slots?" or "I'm never going to use six quivers of 10 arrows... we don't even track them that way!" or "Why did they put spells and thief abilities on the same page, but turn undead by itself? What a waste." On my ancient 2E character sheet I had a chart that automatically populated d20 rolls to AC hit using base THAC0 and up to 4 other weapons. It greatly sped my gameplay, and all I had to do to update it was update the base THAC0 or weapon bonus.

There are some decent form-fillable PDF character sheets out there for 2E, such as Mad Irishman's character sheets, but generally you need Acrobat Professional or another third party PDF program to be able to save those with the forms filled out. I wrestled with it for about two months before I just made my own in Excel, and I didn't look back until 4E when the character program actually worked well.

Answer 2

It appears from the apps comments that the following application does not meet all the above requirements, but you could try using:

AD&D Character Generator on top of BlueStacks which allows you to run mobile apps on a Mac.

The AD&D Character Generator allows you to:

roll up stats, check class/race combos, and see all the final attributes of your character

although with BlueStacks you could probably run Any of the Android or iPhone character generators you find.